LearnIT -future directions for learning with technology at the University of Adelaide
Multimodal learning and international projects
John Field
Presenter's biographical details
John Field was appointed in October 1998 as Director of the International Flexible Learning Unit within the Department of Clinical Nursing at The University of Adelaide where he has the dual roles of establishing a flexible learning program for Australian nurses and developing offshore projects. He has been involved in the provision of distance education for almost fifteen years principally through the University of New England and holds qualifications in nursing, education, law and management.
Abstract
The Internet has permitted the field of competitors to transcend continental boundaries so that every university in the developed world is now a potential competitor. At the same time, like every other university, the University of Adelaide is imploring its staff to generate additional revenues through the recruitment of international students. It may be that there is a halfway house, however. The Department of Clinical Nursing has found that a combination of print and electronic flexible learning media supported by periods of intensive face to face teaching has enabled it to successfully offer courses to students in other countries in a cost effective project based format. This paper reviews the Department's experience, the lesson's learned and potential of this strategy.
Web address
http://online.adelaide.edu.au/LearnIT.nsf/URLs/Multimodal_learning
Introduction
The Department of Clinical Nursing has been very conscious both of the developments in education and of the many constraints on resources, some of which are endemic in universities and some of which are a product of the Department's rather unique situation ie a department offering only postgraduate courses in clinical nursing receiving no HECS funding and reliant on the fees generated by its courses. Such an arrangement has a considerable capacity for focusing one's attention on the various strategies that might be available to enhance the appeal of the courses in the face of intense and intensifying competition and to defray the costs of conducting the courses. I was appointed in late 1998 to develop the Department's courses for off-campus learning and to create and pursue international opportunities for the Department. The central element of the philosophy of the Department of Clinical Nursing is an emphasis on practice and the clinical orientation of its courses and this presents its own set of challenges when it comes to offering courses at a distance. This paper considers those challenges and the strategies adopted by the Department.
The Global Village
A major consideration for universities is the context in which they operate and context is no less a concern for any component of a university. The context is now global in ways that it never has been before. Globalisation is the way of the world according to all the rhetoric and the 'Net is the great enabler for this process. When it comes to technological impact, few phenomena have afforded more credence to the notion of the global village. The technology is there to deliver our courses virtually anywhere in the world. This means that our market place - or put another way, the source of our students - is conceivably also virtually anywhere in the world. However, if we can teach anywhere in the village, so too can our competitors. The corollary of this is that every university in the village is our potential competitor. It may be a village but its very densely populated and it has some very big competitors! I will say more about this particular aspect later in the paper.
The Adaptation of Technology to Education
Over time most technological advances in communications have been incorporated into education one way or another. A good example was the application of radio in the 'School of the Air.' The cost effectiveness and the interactive capacity of radio made this an excellent medium but it was constrained by the lack of visual capacity. When television came along, it had the audio and the video but it lacked affordable interactive capacity. It thus took a long time before efforts were made to formally harness television as a medium of distance education and even then the cost of the medium restricted participation by providers of education. In the main this required substantial consortiums. With the advent of desktop personal computers, times were inevitably to change. Education was an obvious application. However, few people could have foreseen the rapidity of the technological evolution of these machines even to their present point. The birth of the Internet and the World Wide Web has been even more extraordinary. The real question here today is the extent to which we want, should, need or even can recruit this phenomenon to the cause of higher education in an educationally beneficial, cost-effective manner.
The Giant Competitors
Now is the time to consider the options. The University of Adelaide has not ventured too far down the path of virtual education. It has not invested heavily in the infrastructure required to support this form of teaching and organisation. A positive perspective on this is that the University has not irreversibly committed itself to this approach which in many ways threatens the traditional university. Thus, if virtual education proves to be a failure, the traditional university - which has stood the test of time for a thousand years - will have continued to endure. Many universities are in this position. However, many others are not. It is the ones that are not that might be the problem for us.
Some of you will no doubt be aware of the initiatives of the University of Melbourne in pursuing the global university. They have adopted a 'make or break' approach that is predicated on some $2.6 billion and a consortium of some twenty of the best universities around the globe - Universitas 21.We need to watch this space very carefully. In the global village, Harvard University is as direct a competitor as Monash but the article in The Australian very sensibly make the point that Harvard has reserves of some US$17 billion dollars. We do not. This is the scale of the dilemma for The University of Adelaide and how the University resolves this dilemma has very direct implications for individual departments.
The Department of Clinical Nursing's Initiatives
The Department of Clinical Nursing considered the many issues involved for individual departments and reached the conclusion that its own success depended upon the utilisation of flexible learning methods. This involved judgements about the population of potential students in South Australia, the approach to learning, resource implications, feasibility, maintenance of quality and potential national and inter-national markets. In 1999 the Department offered a range of postgraduate courses for off-campus study in Australia using flexible learning methods. The courses included the following: - Graduate Certificate in Trauma Nursing
- Graduate Diploma in High Dependency Nursing
- Graduate Diploma in Gerontological Nursing
- Graduate Diploma in Clinical Nursing
- Master of Nursing Science
- Doctor of Nursing
For 2000 a number of courses have been added to this list and these include:- Graduate Certificate in Hyperbaric Nursing
- Graduate Certificate in Apheresis Nursing
- Graduate Diploma in Public Health Nursing
Achieving the clinical focus
The name of the Department gives a clue to a major consideration in taking the approach we have. The challenge lies in finding a way to effectively teach clinical courses using flexible learning techniques. We have adopted a mixed mode approach to achieve this both in Adelaide and internationally. Thus, in recognising that registered nurses learn in practice as well as in the classroom, we have structured the graduate diplomas to reflect this. They each have a professional stream, a theoretical stream and a clinical stream. It is this that also allows us to be culturally sensitive in the offering of the courses because the teaching and learning occurs in the real world of their practice setting.
In the first twelve months of offering flexible learning, we have largely limited ourselves to print media. However, with staff and students becoming more familiar with both this mode of learning and the working of the Internet, we are now looking to adopt a Web base for at least some of these courses. This is being driven as much by the potential of some international projects as by domestic considerations. These international projects are likely to be the most fertile source of fees income for the Department and for all the reasons that have already been mentioned, this is a critical consideration for the Department. In effect, we need this income in order to develop the quality of the courses that we offer both here and overseas.
The strategy that the Department has adopted recognises the fact that nurses are unlikely to earn large salaries irrespective of where they are located. This is especially true in countries such as India. Nevertheless, although nurses are generally unable to afford the fees required by this university, these countries have a significant demand for courses such as those we offer. In the case of Nursing those fees are AUS$20,000 per annum. The strategy that we have adopted is to teach the courses in the home country using flexible learning methods supported by periods of intensive face to face teaching. By using this approach we are then able to charge a significantly reduced fee. This approach has already been used very successfully by the Department to teach the Master of Nursing Science in Myanmar and we are currently recruiting our first intake of students in India to commence studies in February, 2000.
There is a clear role for Web-based teaching in this model. The plan that we have involves the following staged development: - Encouragement of utilisation of Web access to the University of Adelaide library
- Ensuring that all students have access to email and are in regular email contact with their subject coordinator
- Development of 'chat room' capability for each subject and use of regular on-line tutorials
- All subject study guides and readers on CD-ROM
- All subject study guides on the Web
- All subject readers on the Web
Library Access
The Barr Smith Library has already provided some very useful resources for Nursing including a disk that contains a considerable number of links to nursing sites around the world. Electronic access to the library greatly enhances the access that students have to journals and this is of tremendous significance for a number of our research based subjects. For nursing, access to journals in countries such as India is very limited so this form of access is essential. I am currently exploring the limits of the extent to which the library can be of service to our offshore students. There is a recurrent theme of resourcing these projects. Clearly the Barr Smith Library - like all libraries - is under substantial pressure. Naturally whenever the library is requested to provide what it perceives to be additional services for students it seeks reimbursement for those services.
Email
In offshore projects email is a fundamental tool. It allows a communication conduit that gives the student access to the lecturer as though they were on campus and similarly, it allows academic staff to monitor the progress of the students. The matter of email for offshore students is not so much a matter for the University although the students presumably would be entitled to a University of Adelaide email address which they could access through the Web. Those of us who are responsible for such projects, however, need to be diligent in ensuring that provision is made for access to email either via this mechanism or an alternative in their home country. The precise mode of access may vary according to the structure and location of the project.
Chat rooms
On-line tutorials are an ideal way to supplement the mixed mode teaching that we use in conducting these courses. At present the structure of the courses includes an intensive block of teaching at the beginning of the semester after which the student works through a carefully structured learning package, In 2000 it is intended that this will be reinforced by on-line tutorials which will afford the opportunity of clarifying understanding, providing guided debate and discussion, collective feedback on assignment work and the like.
CD-ROM Based Media
The move to CD-ROM as the basic media is intended to overcome problems of logistics. At present there is a significant expense associated with sending materials to the project country. This can be dramatically reduced by the use of this media.
Web-based subjects
For the same reasons that CD-ROM based media will be beneficial, the use of web-based subjects could greatly facilitate the ease of offering these courses and significantly reduce the cost of doing so.
The Potential
There is a considerable potential in this model. We are currently having discussions in a number of countries including Sri Lanka and China. The early indications are that there is enormous potential in India, significant potential in China and developmental potential in some other countries.
The Limitations
There are some important limitations on the potential of these projects. For instance there are technical limitations. In India, the telecommunications system itself can be a barrier. The quality of the lines can be a problem. Congestion of the lines can be a problem. Monsoonal rains can exacerbate existing problems of both quality and congestion. Congestion of the lines can be compounded by all too frequent natural disasters. Access to hardware can be difficult. Computer literacy can be in short supply. Technical support may not be adequate.
Obviously some of these problems are more manageable than others. There is not much to be done quickly about an overburdened phone system. However there is considerable investment in this system both by government and international aid programs so these problems of congestion and poor quality could improve more quickly than we might expect. There are a number of approaches one can take to circumvent the problem of access to hardware. For example, in Myanmar the Department provided a number of computers to assist the process. In India our initial project is located in Bangalore, a city that is referred to as their 'Silicon Valley'! It is a little known fact that India is the world's largest producer of computer software. We are hoping that the location is a shrewd move!
Another consideration that can limit the success of a project such as this is related to the 'global village that I was discussing at the beginning of this paper. This is the issue of culture. One of the consequences of the global village is the move towards a monoculture. Many countries are concerned at the erosion of their own culture. For our courses to be accepted - irrespective of the mode of delivery - it is vitally important that they take account of the culture of the students. We have sought to achieve this in a number of ways in our print materials but electronic technology makes this a much simpler process.
Conclusion
We believe that the model we are developing succeeds in delivering very high quality courses that meet the needs of practising nurses and particularly those who are or will be the leaders of nursing.
We believe that information technology will rapidly evolve in the environments in which we are working and that creative application of the technology will enable us to progressively place greater reliance on IT as the mainstay of these programs. We see this as our future since we are a specialised Department with not a lot of local growth potential.
 Planning
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